The Christian by Hall Caine (page 8)

above her was the iron grid in the pavement. Somebody on the street walked over it, causing a hollow sound as of soil falling on a coffin.

John Storm was no coward, but a certain tremor passed over him on finding himself in this subterranean lurking-place of men who were as beasts. He stood a full minute unseen. Then he heard the woman say in a low hiss, “Cat’s mee-e-et!” and he knew he had been observed. The men turned and looked at him, not suddenly, or all at once, but furtively, cautiously, slowly. The banker crouched at the table with an astonished face and tried to smuggle the cards out of sight.

John stood calmly, his whole figure displaying courage and confidence. The group of men broke up. “He’s got the ‘coppers,'” said one. Nobody else spoke, and they began to melt away. They disappeared through a door at the back which led into a yard, for, like rats, the human vermin always have a second way out of their holes.

In half a minute the cellar was nearly empty. Only the banker and the woman and one young man remained. The young man was Charlie.

“What cheer, myte?” he said with an air of unconcern. “Is it trecks ye want, sir? Here ye are then,” and he threw a pack of cards at John’s feet.

“It’s that gel o’ yawn that’s done this,” said the woman.

“So it’s a got-up thing, is it?” said Charlie, and stepping to the counter, he took up a drinking-glass, broke it at the rim; and holding its jagged edges outward, turned to use it as a weapon.

John Storm had not yet spoken, but a magnetic instinct warned him. He whistled, and the dog bounded down. The young man threw his broken glass on the floor and cried to the keeper of the house: “Don’t stir, you! First you know, the beast will be at yer throat!”

Hearing Charlie’s voice, Aggie was creeping down the stairs. “Charlie!” she cried. Charlie threw open his coat, stuck his fingers in the armholes of his waistcoat, said in a voice of hatred, passion, and rage, “Go and pawn yourself!” and then swaggered out at the back door. The keeper made show of following, but John Storm called on him to stop. The man looked at the dog and obeyed. “Wot d’ye want o’ me?” he said.

“I want this girl’s baby. That’s the first thing I want. I’ll tell you the rest afterward.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” The man’s grimace was frightful.

“It’s gone, sir. We’ve lost it,” said the woman, with a hideous expression.

“That story will not pass with me, my good woman. Go upstairs and unlock the door! You too, my man, go on!”

A minute later they were in a bedroom above. Three neglected children lay asleep on bundles of rags. One of twelve months’ old was in a wicker cradle, one of three years was in a wooden cot, and a younger child was in a bed. Aggie had come up behind, and stood by the door trembling and weeping.

“Now, my girl, find your baby,” said John, and the young mother hurried with eager eyes from the cradle to the cot and from the cot to the bed.

“Yes, here it is,” she cried. “No–oh no, no!” and she began to wring her hands.

“Told yer so,” said the woman, and with a wicked grin she pointed to a memorial card which hung on the wall.

Aggie’s child was dead and buried. Diarrhoea! The doctor at the dispensary had given a certificate of death, and Charlie had shared the insurance money. “Wish to Christ it was ended!” he had said. He had been drunk ever since.

The poor girl was stunned. She was no longer crying. “Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do?” she said.

“Who’s child is this?” said John, standing over the wicker cradle. The little sufferer from inflamed gums had sobbed itself to sleep.

“A real laidy’s,” said the woman. “Mrs. Jupe told us to tyke great kear of it. The father is Lord something.”

“My poor girl,” said John, turning to Aggie, “could you carry this child home for me?”

“Oh, oh, oh!” said the girl, but she wrapped the shawl about the child and lifted it up sleeping.

“Now, you down’t!” said the man, putting himself on guard before the door. “That child is worth ‘undrids of pounds to me, and—-“

“Stand back, you brute!” said John, and with the girl and her burden he passed out of the house.

The front door stood open and the neighbourhood had been raised. Trollopy women in their under-petticoats and with their hair hanging about their necks were gathered at the end of the court. Aggie was crying again, and John pushed through the crowd without speaking.

They went back by Broad Sanctuary, where a solitary policeman was pacing to and fro on the echoing pavement. Big Ben was chiming the half-hour after midnight. The child coughed like a sheep constantly, and Aggie kept saying, “Oh, oh, oh!”

Mrs. Pincher, in her widow’s cap and white apron, was waiting up for them, and John committed the child to her keeping. Then he said to Aggie, who was turning away, “My poor child, you have suffered deeply, but if you will leave this man I will help you to begin life again, and if you want money I will find it.”

“Well, he _is_ a Father and no mistake!” said Mrs. Pincher; but the girl only answered in a hopeless voice, “I don’t want no money, and I don’t want to begin life again.”

As she crossed the court to her room in the tenement house they heard her “Oh, oh, oh!”

* * * * *

Before going to bed that night John Storm wrote to Glory:

“Hurrah! Have got poor Polly’s baby, so you may set your heart at ease about it. All the days of my life I have been thought to be a dreamer, but it is surprising what a man can do when he sets to work for somebody else! Your former landlady turns out to be the wife of my ‘organ man,’ and it was pitiful to see the dear old simpleton’s devotion to his bogus little baggage. I have lost him, of course, but that was unavoidable.

“It was by help of another victim that I traced the child at last. She is a ballet girl of some sort, and it was as much as I could stand to see the poor young thing carrying Polly’s baby, her own being dead and buried without a word said to her. Short of the grace of God she will go to the bad now. Oh, when will the world see that in dealing with the starved hearts of these poor fallen creatures God Almighty knows best how to do his own business? Keep the child with the mother, foster the maternal instinct, and you build up the best womanhood. Drag them apart, and the child goes to the dogs and the mother to the devil.

“But Polly’s baby is safely lodged with Mrs. Pincher, a dear old grandmotherly soul who will love it like her own, and all the way home I have been making up my mind to start baby-farming myself on fresh lines. He who wrongs the child commits a crime against the State. However low a woman has fallen, she is a subject of the Crown, and if she is a mother she is the Crown’s creditor. These are my first principles, the application will come anon. Meantime you have given me a new career, a glorious mission! Thank God and Glory Quayle for it for ever and ever! Then–who knows?–perhaps you will come back and take it up yourself some day. When I think of the precious time I spent, in that monastery … but no, only for that I should not be here.

“Oh, life is wonderful! But I feel afraid that I shall wake up–perhaps in the streets somewhere–and find I have been dreaming. Deeply grieved to hear of the grandfather’s attack. Trust it has passed. But if not, certain I am that all is well with him and that he is staid only on God.

“Hope you are well and plodding through this wilderness in comfort, avoiding the thorns as well as you can. Glenfaba may be dull, but you do well to keep out of the whirlpool of London for the present. Yours is a snug spot, and when storms are blowing even the sea-gulls shelter about your house, I remember … But why Rosa? Is Peel the only place for a summer holiday?”

IX.

“Glenfaba.

“Oh, my dear John Storm, is it coals of fire you are heaping on my head, or fire of brimstone? Your last letter with its torrents of enthusiasm came sweeping down on me like a flood. What work you are in the midst of! What a life! What a purpose! While I–I am lying here like an old slipper thrown up oil the sea-beach. Oh, the pity oft, the pity oft! It must be glorious to be in the rush and swirl of all this splendid effort, whatever comes of it! One’s soul is thrilled, one’s heart expands! As for me, the garden of my mind is withering, and I am consuming the seed I ought to sow.

“Rosa has come. She has been here a month nearly, and is just charming, say what you will. Her thoughts have the dash of the great world, and I love to hear her talk. True, she troubles me sometimes, but that’s only my envy and malice and all uncharitableness. When she tells of Betty-this and Ellen-that, and their wonderful successes and triumphs, I’m the meanest sinner that crawls.

“It’s funny to see how the old folk bear themselves toward her. Aunt Rachel regards her as a sort of an artist, and is clearly afraid that she will break out into madness in spots somewhere. Aunt Anna disapproves of her hair, which is brushed up like a man’s, and of her skirt, which ‘would be no worse if it were less like a pair of breeches,’ for she has brought her ‘bike.’ She talks on dangerous subjects also, and nobody did such things in auntie’s young days. Then she addresses the old girlies as I do, and calls grandfather ‘G-rand-dad,’ and like the witch of Endor generally, is possessed of a familiar spirit. Of course I give her various warning looks from time to time lest the fat should be in the fire, but she’s a woman, bless her! and it’s as true as ever it was that a woman can keep the secret she doesn’t know.

“Yes, the ideal of womanhood has changed since the old aunties were young; but when I listen to Rosa and then look over at Rachel with her black ringlets, and at Anna with her old-fashioned ‘front,’ I shudder and ask myself, ‘Why do I struggle?’ What is the reward if one gives up the fascination of life and the world? There is no reward. Nothing but solitary old-maidism, unless two of you happen to be sisters, for who else will join her shame to yours? Dreams, dreams, only dreams of the dearest thing that ever comes into a woman’s arms–and then you awake and there is no one there. A dame’s school, when the old father is gone, but no children of your own to love you, nobody to think of you, scraping a little here, pinching a little there, growing older and smaller year by year, looking yellow and craned like an apple that has been kept on the top shelf too long, and then–the end!

“Oh, but I’m trying so hard, so very hard, to be ‘true to the higher self in me,’ because somebody says I must. What do you think I did last week? In my character of Lady Bountiful I gave an old folks’ supper in the soup kitchen, understood to be in honour of my return. Roast beef and plum duff, not to speak of pipes and ‘baccy, and forty old people of both sexes sitting down to ‘the do.’ After supper there was a concert, when Chaise (the fat old thief!) overflowed the ‘elber’ chair, and alluded to me as ‘our beautiful donor,’ and lured me into singing Mylecharaine, and leading the company, when we closed with the doxology.

“But ‘it was not myself at all, Molly dear, ’twas my shadow on the wall,’ and in any case man can’t live by soup kitchens alone–nor woman either. And knowing what a poor, weak, vain woman I am at the best, I ask myself sometimes would it not be a thousand times better if I yielded to my true nature instead of struggling to realize a bloodless ideal that is not me in the least, but only my picture in the heart of some one who thinks me so much better than I am?

“Not that anybody ever sees what a hypocrite I can be, though I came near to letting the cat out of the bag as lately as last night. You must know that when I turned my back on London at the command of John Knox the second, I brought all my beautiful dresses along with me, except such of them as were left at the theatre. Yet I daren’t lay them out in the drawers, so I kept them under lock and key in my boxes. There they lurked like evil spirits in ambush, and as often as their perfume escaped into the room my eyes watered for another sight of them! But in spite of all temptation I resisted, I conquered, I triumphed–until last night when Rosa talked of Juliet, what a glorious creature she was, and how there was nobody on the stage who could ‘look’ her and ‘play’ her too!

“What do you think I did? Shall I tell you? Yes, I will. I crept upstairs to my quiet little room, tugged the box from its hiding-place under the bed, drew out my dresses–my lovely, lovely brocades–and put them on! Then I spoke the potion speech, beginning in a whisper, but getting louder as I went on, and always looking at myself in the glass. I had blown out the candle, and there was no light in the room but the moon that was shining on my face, but I was glowing, my very soul was afire, and when I came to the end I drew myself up with eyes closed and head thrown back and heart that paused a beat or two, and said, ‘_I_–_I_ am Juliet, for I am a great actress!’

“Oh, oh, oh! I could scream with laughter to think of what happened next! Suddenly I became aware of somebody knocking at my door (I had locked it) and of a thin voice outside saying fretfully: ‘Glory, whatever is it? Aren’t you well, Glory?’ It was the little auntie; and thinking what a shock she would have if I opened the door and she came upon this grand Italian lady instead of poor little me, I had to laugh and to make excuses while I smuggled off my gorgeous things and got back into my plain ones!

“It was a narrow squeak; but I had a narrower one some days before. Poor grandfather! He regards Rosa as belonging to a superior race, and loves to ask her what she thinks of Glory. He has grown quite simple lately, and as soon as he thinks my back is turned he is always saying, ‘And what is your opinion of my granddaughter, Miss Macquarrie?’ To which she answers, ‘Glory is going to make your name immortal, Mr. Quayle.’ Then his eyes sparkle and he says, ‘Do you think so?–do you really think so?’ Whereupon she talks further balderdash, and the dear old darling smiles a triumphant smile!

“But I always notice that not long afterward his eyes look wet and his head hangs low, and he is saying to the aunties, with a crack in his voice: ‘She’ll go away again. You’ll see she will. Her beauty and her talents belong to the world.’ And then I burst in on them and scold them, and tell them not to talk nonsense.

“Nevertheless he is beginning to regard Rosa with suspicion, as if she were a witch luring me away, and one evening last week we had to steal into the garden to talk that we might escape from his watchful eyes. The sun had set–there was the red glow behind the castle across the sky and the sea, and we were walking on the low path by the river under the fuchsia hedge that hangs over from the lawn, you know. Rosa was talking with her impetuous dash of the great career open to any one who could win the world in London, how there were people enough to help her on, rich men to find her opportunities, and even to take theatres for her if need be. And I was hesitating and halting and stammering: ‘Yes, yes, if it were the _regular_ stage … who knows? … perhaps it might not be opened to the same objections, …’ when suddenly the leaves of the fuchsia rustled as with a gust of wind, and we heard footsteps on the path above.

“It was the grandfather, who had come out on Rachel’s arm and overheard what I had said! ‘It’s Glory!’ he faltered, and then I heard him take his snuff and blow his nose as if to cover his confusion, thinking I was deceiving them and carrying on a secret intercourse. I hardly know what happened next, except that for the five minutes following ‘the great actress’ had to talk with the tongues of men and angels (Beelzebub’s) in order to throw dust in the dear old eyes and drive away their doubts. It was a magnificent performance, ‘you go bail.’ I’ll never do the like of it again, though I had only one old man and one old maid and one young woman for audience. The house ‘rose’ at me too, and the poor old grandfather was appeased. But when we were back indoors I overheard him saying: ‘After all there’s no help for it. She’s dull with us–what wonder! We can’t cage our linnet, Rachel, and perhaps we shouldn’t try. A song-bird came to cheer us, but it will fly away. We are only old folks, dear–it’s no use crying.’ And on going to his room that night he closed his door and said his prayers in a whisper, that I might not hear him when he sobbed.

“He hasn’t left his bed since. I fear he never will More than once I have been on the point of telling him there is no reason to think the deluge would come if I _did_, go back to London; but I will never leave him now. Yet I wish Aunt Rachel wouldn’t talk so much of the days when I went away before. It seems that every night, on his way to his own room, he used to step into my empty one and come out with his eyes dim and his lips moving. I am not naturally hard-hearted, but I can’t love grandfather like that. Oh, the cruelty of life! … I know it ought to be the other way about; … but I can’t help it.

“All the same I could cry to think how short life is, and how little of it I can spare. ‘Cling fast to me and hold me,’ my heart is always saying, but meantime London is calling to me, calling to me, like the sea, and I feel as if I were a wandering mermaid and she were my ocean home.

* * * * *

“Later.–Poor, poor grandfather! I was interrupted in the writing of my letter this morning by another of those sudden alarms. He had fainted again, and it is extraordinary how helpless the aunties are in a case of illness. Grandfather knows it too; and after I had done all I could to bring him round, he opened his eyes and whispered that he had something to say to me alone. At that the poor old things left the room with tears of woe and a look of understanding. Then fetching a difficult breath he said, ‘_You_ are not afraid, Glory, are you?’ and I answered him ‘No,’ though my heart was trembling. And then a feeble smile struggled through the wan features of his drawn face, and he told me his attack was only another summons. ‘I’ll soon die for good,’ he said, ‘and you must be strong and brave, my child, for death is the common lot, and then what is there to fear?’ I didn’t try to contradict him–what was the good of doing that? And after he had spoken of the coming time he talked quietly of his past life, how he had weathered the storm for seventy odd years, and his Almighty Father was bringing him into harbour at last. ‘I can’t pray for life any longer, Glory. Many a time I did so in the old days when I had to bring up my little granddaughter, but my task is over now, and after the day is done where is the tired labourer who does not lie down to his rest with a will?’

“The doctor has been and gone. There is no ailment, and nothing to be done or hoped. It is only a general failure and a sinking earthward of the poor worn-out body as the soul rises to the heaven that is waiting to receive it. What a pagan I feel beside him! And how glad I am that I didn’t talk of leaving him again when he was on the eve of his far longer journey! I have sent the aunties to bed, but Rosa has made me promise to awaken her at four, that she may take her turn at his bedside.

* * * * *

“Next Morning.–Rosa relieved me during the night, and I came to my room and lay down in the dullness of the dawn. But now I am sorry that I allowed her to do so, for I did not sleep, and grandfather appears to have been troubled with dreams. I fancied he shuddered a little as I left them together, and more than once through the wall I heard him cry, ‘Bring him back!’ in the toneless voice of one who is labouring under the terrors of a nightmare. But each time I heard Rosa comforting him, so I lay down again without going in.

“Being stronger this morning, he has been propped up in bed writing a letter. When he called for the pens and paper I asked if I couldn’t write it for him, but the old darling made a great mystery of the matter, and looked artful, and asked if it was usual to fight your enemy with his own powder and shot. Of course I humoured him and pretended to be mighty curious, though I think I know who the letter was written to, all the same that he kept the address side of the envelope hidden even when the front of it was being sealed. He sealed it with sealing-wax, and I held the candle while he did so, with his poor trembling fingers in danger from the light, and then I stamped it with my mother’s pearl ring, and he smuggled it under the pillow.

“Since breakfast he has shown an increased inclination to doze, but there have been visits from the wardens and from neighbouring parsons, for a _locum tenens_ has had to be appointed. Of course, they have all inquired where his pain is, and on being told that he has none, they have gone downstairs cackling and clucking and crowing in various versions of ‘Praise God for that!’ I hate people who are always singing the doxology.

* * * * *

“Noon.–Condition unchanged, except that in the intervals of drowsiness his mind has wandered a little. He appears to live in the past. Looking at me with conscious eyes, he calls me ‘Lancelot’–my father’s name. It has been so all the morning. One would think he was walking in a twilight land where he mistakes people’s faces and the dead are as much alive as the living.

“They all think I am brave, oh, so brave! because I do not cry now, as everybody else does–even Aunt Anna behind her apron–although my tears can flow so easily, and at other times I keep them constantly on tap. But I am really afraid, and down at the bottom of my heart I am terrified. It is just as if _something_ were coming into the house slowly, irresistibly, awfully, and casting its shadow on the floor already.

“I have found out the cause of his outcries in the night. Aunt Rachel says he was dreaming of my father’s departure for Africa. That was twenty-two years ago, but it seems that the memory of the last day has troubled him a good deal lately. ‘Don’t you remember it?’ he has been saying. ‘There were no railways in the island then, and we stood at the gate to watch the coach that was taking him away. He sat on the top and waved his red handkerchief. And when he had gone, and it was no use watching, we turned back to the house–you and Anna and poor, pretty young Elise. He never came back, and when Glory goes again she’ll never come back either.’

“In the intervals of his semi-consciousness, when he mistakes me for my father, my wonderful bravery often fails me, and I find excuses for going out of the room. Then I creep noiselessly through the house and listen at half-open doors. Just now I heard him talking quite rationally to Rachel, but in a voice that seemed to speak inwardly, not outwardly, as before. ‘She can’t help it, poor child!’ he said. ‘Some day she’ll know what it is, but not yet, not until she has a child of her own. The race looks forward, not backward. God knew when he created us that the world couldn’t go on without that bit of cruelty, and who am I that I should complain?’

“I couldn’t bear it any longer, and with a pain at my heart I ran in and cried, ‘I’ll never leave you, grandfather.’ But he only smiled and said, ‘I’ll not be keeping you long, Glory, I’ll not be keeping you long,’ and then I could have died for shame.

* * * * *

“Evening.–All afternoon he has been like a child, and everything present to his consciousness seems to have been reversed. The shadow of eternity appears to have wiped out time. When I have raised him up in bed he has delighted to think he was a little boy in his young mother’s arms. Oh, sweet dream! The old man with his furrowed forehead and beautiful white head and all the heavy years rolled back! More than once he has asked me if he may play till bedtime, and I have stroked his wrinkled hands and told him ‘Yes,’ for I pretend to be his mother, who died, when she was old.

“But the ‘part’ is almost too much for me, and, lest I should break down under the strain of it, I am going out of his room constantly. I have just been into his study. It is as full as ever of his squeezes and rubbings and plaster casts and dusty old runes. He has spent all his life away back in the tenth century, and now he is going farther, farther….

“Oh, I’m aweary, aweary! If anything happens to grandfather I shall soon leave this place; there will be nothing to hold me here any longer, and besides I could not bear the sight of these evidences of his gentle presence, so simple, so touching. But what a vain thing London is with all its vast ado–how little, how pitiful!

* * * * *

“Later.–It is all over! The curtain has fallen, and I am not crying. If I did cry it would not be from grief, but because the end was so beautiful, so glorious! It was at sunset, and the streamers of the sun were coming horizontally into the room. He awoke from a long drowsiness, and a serenity almost angelic overspread his face. I could see that he was himself once again. Death had led him back through the long years since he was a child, and he knew he was an old man and I a young woman. ‘Have the boats gone yet?’ he asked, meaning the herring boats that go at sunset. I looked out and told him they were at the point of going. ‘Let me see them sail,’ he said, so I slipped my arms about him and raised him until he was sitting up and could see down the length of the harbour and past the castle to the sea. The reflection of the sunlight was about his silvery old head, and over the damps and chills of death it made a radiance on his face like a light from heaven. There was hardly a breeze, and the boats were dropping down from their berths with their brown sails half set. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s the other way with me, Glory. I’m coming in, not going out. I’ve been beating to windward all my life, but I see the harbour on my lee-bow at last as plainly as I ever saw Peel, and now I’m only waiting for the top of the tide and the master of the port to run up the flag!’

“Then his head fell gently back on my arm and his lips changed colour, but his eyes did not close, and over his saintly face there passed a fleeting smile. Thus died a Christian gentleman–a simple, sunny, merry, happy, childlike creature, and of such are the kingdom of heaven.

“Glory.”

* * * * *

_Parson Quayle’s Letter._

“Dear John: Before this letter reaches you, or perhaps along with it, you will receive the news that tells you what it is. I am ‘in,’ John; I can say no more than that. The doctor tells me it may be now or then or at any time. But I am looking for my enlargement soon, and whether it comes to-morrow sunset or with to-day’s next tide I leave myself in His hands in whose hands we all are. Well has the wise man said, ‘The day of our death is better than the day of our birth, so with all good will, and what legacy of strength old age has left to me, I send you my last word and message.

“My poor old daughters are sorely stricken, but Glory is still brave and true, being, as she always was, a quivering bow of steel. People tell me that the poor mother is strong in the girl, and the spirit of the mother’s race; but well I know the father’s stalwart soul supports her; and I pray God that when my dark hour comes her loving and courageous arms may be around me.

“That brings me to the object of my letter. This living will soon be vacant, and I am wondering who will follow in my feeble steps. It is a sweet spot, John! The old church does not look so ill when the sun shines on it, and in the summer-time this old garden is full of fruit and flowers. Did I ever tell you that Glory was born here? I never had another grandchild, and we were great comrades from the first. She was a wise and winsome little thing, and I was only an old child myself, so we had many a run and romp in these grounds together. When I try to think of the place without her it is a vain effort and a painful one; and even while she was away in your great and wicked Babylon, with its dangers and temptations, her little ghost seemed to lurk at the back of every bush and tree, and sometimes it would leap out on me and laugh.

“It is months since I saw your father, but they tell me he has lately burned his bureau, making one vast bonfire of the gatherings of twenty years. That is not such ill news either; and maybe, now the great ado that worked such woe is put by and gone, he would rejoice to see you back at home, and open his hungering arms to you.

“But my eyes ache and my pen is shaking. Farewell! Farewell! Farewell! An old man leaves you his blessing, John. God grant that in his own good time we may meet in a blessed paradise, rejoicing in his gracious mercy, and all our sins forgiven!

“Adam Quayle.”

X.

Glory’s letter and its inclosure fell on John Storm like rain in the face of a man on horseback–he only whipped up and went faster.

“How can I find words,” he wrote, “to express what I feel at your mournful news? Yet why mournful? His life’s mission was fulfilled, his death was a peaceful victory, and we ought to rejoice that he was so easily released. I trust you will not mourn too heavily for him, or allow his death to stop your life. It would not be right. No trouble came near his stainless heart, no shadow of sin; his old age was a peaceful day which lasted until sunset. He was a creature that had no falsetto in a single fibre of his being, no shadow of affectation. He kept like this through all our complicated existence in this artificial world, absolutely unconscious of the hollowness and pretension and sham that surrounded him–tolerant, too, and kind to all. Then why mourn for him? He is gathered in–he is safe.

“His letter was touching in its artful simplicity. It was intended to ask me to apply for his living. But my duty is here, and London must make the best of me. Yet more than ever now I feel my responsibility with regard to yourself. The time is not ripe to advise you. I am on the eve of a great effort. Many things have to be tried, many things attempted. It is a gathering of manna–a little every day. To God’s keeping and protection meantime I commit you. Comfort your aunts, and let me know if there is anything that can be done for them.”

The ink of this letter was hardly dry when John Storm was in the middle of something else. He was in a continual fever now. Above all, his great scheme for the rescue and redemption of women and children possessed him. He called it Glory’s scheme when he talked of it to himself. It might be in the teeth of nineteenth-century morality, but what matter about that? It was on the lines of Christ’s teaching when he forgave the woman and shamed the hypocrites. He would borrow for it, beg for it, and there might be conditions under which he would steal for it too.

Mrs. Callender shook her head.

“I much misdoubt there’ll be scandal, laddie. It’s a woman’s work, I’m thinking.”

“‘Be thou as chaste as ice,’ auntie, ‘as pure as snow’ … but no matter! I intend to call out the full power of a united Church into the warfare against this high wickedness. Talk of the union of Christendom! If we are in earnest about it we’ll unite to protect and liberate our women.”

“But where’s the siller to come frae, laddie?”

“Anywhere–everywhere! Besides, I have a bank I can always draw on, auntie.”

“You’re no meaning the Prime Minister again, surely?”

“I mean the King of Kings. God will provide for me, in this, as in everything.”

Thus his reckless enthusiasm bore down everything, and at the back of all his thoughts was the thought of Glory. He was preparing a way for her; she was coming back to a great career, a glorious mission; her bright soul would shine like a star; she would see that he had been right, and faithful, and then–then—-But it was like wine coursing through his veins–he could not think of it.

Three thousand pounds had to be found to buy or build homes with, and he set out to beg for the money. His first call was at Mrs. Macrae’s. Going up to the house, he met the lady’s poodle in a fawn-coloured wrap coming out in charge of a footman for its daily walk round the square.

He gave the name of “Father Storm,” and after some minutes of waiting he was told that the lady had a headache and was not receiving that day.

“Say the nephew of the Prime Minister wishes to see her,” said John.

Before the footman had returned again there was the gentle rustle of a dress on the stairs, and the lady herself was saying: “Dear Mr. Storm, come up. My servants are real tiresome, they are always confusing names.”

Time had told on her; she was looking elderly, and the wrinkles about her eyes could no longer be smoothed out. But her “front” was curled, and she was still saturated in perfume.

“I heard of your return, dear Mr. Storm,” she said, in the languid voice of the great lady, but the accent of St. Louis, as she led the way to the drawing-room. “My daughter told me about it. She was always interested in your work, you know…. Oh, yes, quite well, and having a real good time in Paris. Of course, you know she has been married. A great loss to me naturally, but being God’s will I felt it was my duty as a mother—-” and then a pathetic description of her maternal sentiments, consoled by the circumstance that her son-in-law belonged to “one of the best families,” and that she was constantly getting newspapers from “the other side” containing full accounts of the wedding and of the dresses that were worn at it.

John twirled his hat in his hand and listened.

“And what are your dear devoted people doing down there in Soho?”

Then John told of his work for working girls, and the great lady pretended to be deeply interested. “Why, they’ll soon be better than the upper classes,” she said.

John thought it was not improbable, but he went on to tell of his scheme, and how small was the sum required for its execution.

“Only three thousand! That ought to be easily fixed up. Why, certainly!”

“Charity is the salt of riches, madam, and if rich people would remember that their wealth is a trust—-“

“I do–I always do. ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth’–what a beautiful text _that_ is!”

“I’m glad to hear you say so, madam. So many Christian people allow that God is the God of the widow and fatherless, while the gods they really worship are the gods of silver and gold.”

“But I love the dear children, and I like to go to the institution to see them in their nice white pinafores making their curtsies. But what you say is real true, Mr. Storm; and since I came from Sent Louis I’ve seen considerable people who are that silly about cats—-” and then a long story of the folly of a lady friend who once had a pet Persian, but it died, and she wore crape for it, and you could never mention a cat in her hearing afterward.

At that moment the poodle came back from its walk, and the lady called it to her, fondled it affectionately, said it was a present from her poor dear husband, and launched into an account of her anxieties respecting it, being delicate and liable to colds, notwithstanding the trousseau (it was a lady poodle) which the fashionable dog tailor in Regent Street had provided for it.

John got up to take his leave. “May I then count on your kind support on behalf of our poor women and children of Soho?”

“Ah, of course, that matter–well, you see the Archdeacon kindly comes to talk ‘City’ with me–in fact, I’m expecting him to-day–and I never do anything without asking his advice, never, in my present state of health–I have a weak heart, you know,” with her head aside and her saturated pocket-handkerchief at her nose. “But has the Prime Minister done anything?”

“He has advanced me two thousand pounds.”

“Really?” rising and kicking back her train. “Well, as I say, we ought to fix it right away. Why not hold a meeting in my drawing-room? All denominations, you say? I don’t mind–not in a cause like that,” and she glanced round her room as if thinking it was always possible to disinfect it afterward.

Somebody was coughing loudly in the hall as John stepped downstairs. It was the Archdeacon coming in. “Ah,” he exclaimed, with a flourish of the hand, greeting John as if they had parted yesterday and on the best of terms. Yes, there _had_ been changes, and he was promoted to a sphere of higher usefulness. True, his good friends had looked for something still higher, but it was the premier archdeaconry at all events, and in the Church, as in life generally, the spirit of compromise ruled everything. He asked what John was doing, and on being told he said, with a somewhat more worldly air, “Be careful, my dear Storm, don’t encourage vice. For my part, I am tired of the ‘fallen sister.’ To tell you the truth, I deny the name. The painted Jezebel of the Piccadilly pavement is no sister of mine.”

“We don’t choose our relations, Archdeacon,” said John. “If God is our Father, then all men are our brothers, and all women are our sisters whether we like it or not.”

“Ah! The same man still, I see. But we will not quarrel about words. Seen the dear Prime Minister lately? Not _very_ lately? Ah, well”–with a superior smile–“the air of Downing Street–it’s so bad for the memory, they say,” and coughing loudly again, he stepped upstairs.

John Storm went home that day light-handed but with a heavy heart.

“Begging is an ill trade on a fast day, laddie,” said Mrs. Callender. “Sit you down and tak’ some dinner.”

“How dare these people pray, ‘Our Father which art in heaven?’ It’s blasphemy! It’s deceit!”

“Aye, and they would deceive God about their dividends if he couldn’t see into their safes.”

“Their money is the meanest thing Heaven gives them. If I asked them for their health or their happiness, Lord God, what would they say?”

On the Sunday night following John Storm preached to an overflowing congregation from the text, “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth and honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”

But a few weeks afterward his face was bright and his voice was cheery, and he was writing another letter to Glory:

“In full swing at last, Glory. To carry out my new idea I had to get three thousand pounds more of my mother’s money from my uncle. He gave it up cheerfully, only saying he was curious to see what approach to the Christian ideal the situation of civilization permitted. But Mrs. Callender is _dour_, and every time I spend sixpence of my own money on the Church she utters withering sarcasms about being only a ‘daft auld woman hersel’,’ and then I have to caress and coax her.

“The newspapers were facetious about my ‘Baby Houses’ until they scented the Prime Minister at the back of them, and now they call them the ‘Storm Shelters,’ and christen my nightly processions ‘The White-cross Army.’ Even the Archdeacon has begun to tell the world how he ‘took an interest’ in me from the first and gave me my title. I met him again the other day at a rich woman’s house, where we had only one little spar, and yesterday he wrote urging me to ‘organize my great effort,’ and have a public dinner in honour of its inauguration. I did not think God’s work could be well done by people dining in herds and drinking bottles of champagne, but I showed no malice. In fact, I agreed to hold a meeting in the lady’s drawing-room, to which clergymen, laymen, and members of all denominations are being invited, for this is a cause that rises above all differences of dogma, and I intend to try what can be done toward a union of Christendom on a social basis. Mrs. Callender is dour on that subject too, reminding me that where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together. The Archdeacon thinks we must have the meeting before the twelfth of August, or not until after the middle of September, and Mrs. Callender understands this to mean that ‘the Holy Ghost always goes to sleep in the grouse season.’

“Meantime my Girls’ Club goes like a forest fire. We are in our renovated clergy-house at last, and have everything comfortable. Two hundred members already, chiefly dressmakers and tailors, and girls out of the jam and match factories. The bright, merry young things, rejoicing in their brief blossoming time between girlhood and womanhood. I love to be among them and to look at their glistening eyes! Mrs. Callender blows withering blasts on this head also, saying it is no place for a ‘laddie,’ whereupon I lie low and think much but say nothing.

“Our great night is Sunday night after service. Yes, indeed, Sunday! That’s just when the devil’s houses are all open round about us, and why should God’s house be shut up? It is all very well for the people who have only one Sabbath in the week to keep it wholly holy–I have seven, being a follower of Jesus, not of Moses. But the rector of the parish has begun to complain of my ‘intrusion,’ and to tell the Bishop I ought to be ‘mended or ended.’ It seems that my ‘doings’ are ‘indecent and unnecessary,’ and my sermons are ‘a violation of all the sanctities, all the modesties of existence.’ Poor dumb dog, teaching the Gospel of Don’t! The world has never been reformed by ‘resignation’ to the evils of life, or converted by ‘silence’ either.

“How I wish you were here, in the midst of it all! And–who knows?–perhaps you will be some day yet. Do not trouble to answer this–I will write again soon, and may then have something practical to say to you. _Au revoir!_”

XI.

On the day of the drawing-room meeting a large company gathered in the hall at Belgrave Square. Lady Robert Ure, back from the honeymoon, received the guests for her mother, whose weak heart and a headache kept her upstairs. Her husband stood aside, chewing the end of his mustache and looking through his eyeglass with a gleam of amused interest in his glittering eye. There were many ladies, all fashionably dressed, and one of them wore a seagull’s wing in her hat, with part of the root left visible and painted red to show that it had been torn out of the living bird. The men were nearly all clergymen, and the cut of their cloth and the fashions of their ties indicated the various complexions of their creeds. They glanced at each other with looks of embarrassment, and Mrs. Callender, who came in like a breeze off a Scottish moor, said audibly that she had never seen “sae many craws on one tree before.” The Archdeacon was there with his head up, talking loudly to Lady Robert. She stood motionless in her place, never turning her head toward John Storm, though it was plain that she was looking at him constantly. More than once he caught an expression of pain in her face, and felt pity for her as one of the brides who had acted the lie of marrying without love. But his spirits were high. He welcomed everybody, and even bantered Mrs. Callender when she told him she “objected to the hale thing,” and said, “Weel, weel, wait a wee.”

The Archdeacon gave the signal and led the way with Lady Robert to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Macrae, redolent of perfume, was reclining on a sofa with the “lady poodle” by her side. As soon as the company were seated the Archdeacon rose and coughed loudly.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we have no assurance of a blessing except ‘Ask and ye shall receive.’ Therefore, before we go further, it is our duty, as brethren of a common family in Christ, to ask the blessing of Almighty God on this enterprise.”

There was a subdued rustle of drooping hats and bonnets, when suddenly a thin voice was heard to say, “Mr. Archdeacon, may I inquire first who is to ask the blessing?”

“I thought of doing so myself,” said the Archdeacon with a meek smile.

“In that case, as a Unitarian, I must object to an invocation in which I do not believe.”

There was a half-suppressed titter from the wall at the back, where Lord Robert Ure was standing with his face screwed up to his eyeglass.

“Well, if the name of our Lord is a stumbling block to our Unitarian, brother, no doubt the prayer in this instance would be acceptable without the customary Christian benediction.”

“That’s just like you,” said a large man near the door, with whiskers all round his face. “You’ve been trimming all your life, and now you are going to trim away the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“If our Low-Church brother thinks he can do better—-“

But John Storm intervened. He had looked icy cold, though the twitching of his lower lip showed that he was red hot within.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a quavering voice, “I apologize for bringing you together. I thought if we were in earnest about the union of Christendom we might at least unite in the real contest with evil. But I find it is a dream; we have only been trifling with ourselves, and there is not one of us who wants the union of Christendom, except on the condition that his rod shall be like Aaron’s rod which swallowed up all the rest. It was a mistake, and I beg your pardon.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Archdeacon, “it _was_ a mistake; and if you had taken my advice from the first, and asked the blessing of God through good High Churchmen alone—-“

“God doesn’t wait for any asking,” said John, now flushing up to the eyes. “He gives freely to High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No Churchmen alike.”

“If that is your opinion, sir, you are no better than some of your friends, and for my part I will never darken your door again!”

“_Darken_ is a good word for it, Archdeacon,” said John, and with that the company broke up.

Mrs. Macrae looked like a thunder-cloud as John bowed to her on passing out, but Mrs. Callender cried out in a jubilant voice, “Be skipper of your ain ship, laddie!” and added (being two yards behind the Archdeacon’s broad back going down the stairs), “If some folks are to be inheritors of the kingdom of heaven there’ll be a michty crush at the pearly gates, I’m thinking!”

John Storm went back to Soho with a heavy heart. Going up Victoria Street he passed a crowd of ragged people who were ploughing their way through the carriages. Two constables were taking a man and woman to the police court in Rochester Row. The prisoners were Sharkey, the keeper of the gambling house, and his wife the baby-farmer.

But within a week John Storm, in greater spirits than ever, was writing to Glory again:

“The Archdeacon has deserted me, but no matter! My uncle has advanced me another thousand of my mother’s money, so the crusade is _self_-supporting in one sense at all events. What a fool I am! Ask Aunt Anna her opinion of me, or say old Chalse or the village natural–but never mind! Folly and wisdom are relative terms, and I don’t envy the world its narrow ideas of either. You would be amused to see how the women of the West End are taking up the movement–Lady Robert Ure among the rest! They have banded themselves into a Sisterhood, and christened our clergy-house a ‘Settlement.’ One of my Greek owners came in the other evening to see the alterations. His eyes glistened at the change, and he asked leave to bring a friend. I trust you are well and settling things comfortably, and that Miss Macquarrie has gone. It is raining through a colander here, but I have no time to think of depressing weather. Sometimes when I cross our great squares, where the birds sing among the yellowing leaves, my mind goes off to your sweet home in the sunshine; and when I drop into the dark alleys and lanes, where the pale-faced children play in their poverty and rags, I think of a day that is coming, and, God willing, is now so near, when a ministering angel of tenderness and strength will he passing through them like a gleam. But I am more than ever sure that you do well to avoid for the present the pompous joys of life in London, where for one happy being there are a thousand pretenders to happiness.”

On the Sunday night following, Crook Lane, outside the clergy-house, was almost blocked with noisy people of both sexes. They were a detachment of the “Skeletons,” and the talk among them was of the trial of the Sharkeys, which had taken place the day before. “They’ve ‘ed six menths,” said one. “And it’s all along o’ minjee parsons,” said another; and Charlie Wilkes, who had a certain reputation for humour, did a step-dance and sang some doggerel beginning–

Father Storm is a werry good man,
‘E does you all the ‘arm ‘e can.

Through this crowd two gentlemen pushed their way to the clergy-house, which was brilliantly lit up. One of them was the Greek owner, the other was Lord Robert Ure. Entering a large room on the ground floor, they first came upon John Storm, in cassock and biretta, standing at the door and shaking hands with everybody who came in and went out. He betrayed no surprise, but greeted them respectfully and then passed them on. Every moment of his time was occupied. The room was full of the young girls of the district, with here and there a Sister out of another world entirely. Some were reading, some conversing, some laughing, some playing a piano, and some singing. Their voices filled the air like the chirping of birds, and their faces were bright and happy. “Good-evening, Father,” they said on entering, and “Good-night, Father,” as they went away.

The two men stood some minutes and looked round the room. It was observed that Lord Robert did not remove his hat. He kept chewing the end of a broken cigarette, whereof the other end hung down his chin. One of the Sisters heard him say, “It will do with a little alteration, I think.” Then he went off alone, and the Greek owner stepped up to John Storm.

It was not at first that John could attend to him, and when he was able to do so he began to rattle on about his own affairs. “See,” he said with a delighted smile and a wave of the arm, “see how crowded we are! We’ll have to think of taking in the next door soon.”

“Father Storm,” said the Greek, “I have something serious to say, though the official notification will of course reach you by another channel.”

John’s face darkened as a ripe cornfield does when the sun dies away from it.

“I am sorry to tell you that the trustees, having had a favourable offer for this property—-“

“Well?” His great staring eyes had stopped the man.

“—-have decided to sell.”

“_Sell_? Did you say se—-? To whom? What?”

“To tell you the truth, to the syndicate of a music hall.”

John staggered back, breathing audibly. “Now if a man had to believe that–Do you know if I thought such a thing _could_ happen—-“

“I’m sorry you take the matter so seriously, Father Storm. It’s true you’ve spent money on the property, but, believe me, the trustees will derive no profit—-“

“Profit? Money? Do you suppose I’m thinking of that, and not of the desecration, the outrage, the horror? But who are they? Is that man–Lord—-“

The Greek had nodded his head, and John flung open the door. “Out of this! Out of it, you Judas!” And almost before the Greek had crossed the threshold the door was banged at his back.

The incident had been observed, and there was dead silence in the club-room, but John only cried, “Let’s sing something, girls,” and when a Sister struck up his favourite Nazareth there was no voice so loud as his.

But he had realized everything. “Gloria” was coming back, and the work of months was overthrown!

When he was going home groups of the girls were talking in whispers in the hall, and Mrs. Pincher, who was wiping her eyes at the door, said, “I wonder you don’t drown yourself–I do!”

At the corner of the lane Mr. Jupe was waiting for him to beg his pardon and to ask his advice. What he had said of Mrs. Jupe had turned out to be true. The Sharkeys had “split” on her and she had been arrested. “It was all in the evenin’ pipers last night,” the weak creature whimpered, “and to-day my manager told me I ‘ad best look out for another place. Oh, my poor Lidjer! What am I to do?”

“Do? Cut her off like a rotten bough!” said John scornfully, and with that he strode down the street. The human sea roared around him, and he felt as if he wanted to fling himself into the midst of it and be swallowed up.

On reaching Victoria Square he told Mrs. Callender the news–flung it out at her with a sort of triumphant shout. His church had been sold over his head, and being only “Chaplain to the Greek-Turks,” he was to be turned into the streets. Then he laughed wildly, and by some devilish impulse began to abuse Glory. “The next chaplain is to be a girl,” he cried, “one of those creatures who throw kisses at gaping crowds and sweep curtsies for their dirty crusts.”

But all at once he turned white as a ghost and sat down trembling. Mrs. Callender’s face was twitching, and to prevent herself from crying she burst into scorching satire. “There!” she said, sitting in her rocking-chair and rocking herself furiously, “I ken’d weel what it would come til! Adversity mak’s a man wise, they say, if it doesna mak’ him rich. But it’s the Prime Minister I blame for this. The auld dolt! he must be fallen to his dotage. It’s enough to mak’ a reasonable body go out of her mind to think of sic wise asses. I told you what to expect, but you were always miscalling me for a suspicious auld woman. Oh, it’s a thing ye’d no suspect; but Jane Callender is only a daft auld fool, ye see, and doesna ken what she’s saying!”

But at the next moment she had jumped up and flung her arms about John’s neck, and was crying over him like a girl. “Oh, my son! my ain son! And is it for me to fling out at ye? Aye, aye, it’s a heartless world, laddie!”

He kissed the old woman, and then she tried to coax him to eat. “Come, come, a wee bittie, just a wee bittie. We must eat our supper anyway.”

“God seems dead and heaven a long way off!” he murmured.

“And a drap o’ whisky will do no harm–a wee drappie.”

“There’s only one thing clear–God sees I’m unfit for the work, so he has taken it away from me.”

She turned aside from the table, and the supper was left untouched.

* * * * *

The first post next morning brought a letter from Glory.

“The Garden House,

“Clement’s Inn, W. C.

“Forgive me! I have returned to town! I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t, I couldn’t! London dragged me back. What was I to do after everything was settled and the aunties provided for?–assist in a dame’s school and wage war with pothooks and hangers? Oh! I was dying of weariness–dying, dying, dying!

“And then they made me such tempting offers. Not the music hall–don’t think that. I dare say you were quite right there. No, but the theatre, the regular theatre! Mr. Drake has bought some broken-down old place, and is to turn it into a beautiful theatre expressly for me. I am to play Juliet. Only think–Juliet!–and in my own theatre! Already I feel like a liberated slave who has crossed her Red Sea.

“And don’t think a woman’s mourning is like the silly old laws which lasted but three days. _He_ is buried in my heart, not in the earth, and I shall love him and revere him always! And then didn’t you tell me yourself it would not be right to allow his death to stop my life?

“Write and say you forgive me, John. Reply by return, and make yourself your own postman–registered. You’ll find me here at Rosa’s. Come, come, come! I’ll never forgive you if you don’t come soon–never, never!

“Glory.”

XII.

A fortnight had passed, and John Storm had not yet visited Glory. Nevertheless, he had heard of her from day to day through the medium of the newspapers. Every morning he had glanced down the black columns for the name that stood out from them as if its letters had been printed in blood. The reports had been many and mysterious. First, the brilliant young artiste, who had made such an extraordinary impression some months before, had returned to London and would shortly resume the promising career which had been interrupted by illness and family bereavement. Next, the forthcoming appearance would be on the regular stage, and in a Shakespearian character, which was always understood to be a crucial test of histrionic genius. Then, the revival of Romeo and Juliet, which had formerly been in contemplation, would probably give way to the still more ambitious project of an entirely new production by a well-known Scandinavian author, with a part peculiarly fitted to the personality and talents of the _debutante_. Finally, a syndicate was about to be formed for the purchase of some old property, with a view to its reconstruction as a theatre, in the interests of the new play and the new player.

John Storm laughed bitterly. He told himself that Glory was unworthy of the least of his thoughts. It was his duty to go on with his work and think of her no more.

He had received his official notice to quit. The church was to be given up in a month, the clergy-house in two months, and he believed himself to be immersed in preparations for the rehousing of the club and home. Twenty young mothers and their children now lived in the upper rooms, under obedience to the Sisterhood, but Polly’s boy had remained with Mrs. Pincher. From time to time he had seen the little one tethered to a chair by a scarf about its waist, creeping by the wall to the door, and there gazing out on the world with looks of intelligence, and babbling to it in various inarticulate noises. “Boo-loo! Lal-la! Mum-um!” The little dark face had the eyes of its mother, but it represented Glory for all that. John Storm loved to see it. He felt that he could never part with it, and that if Lord Robert Ure himself came and asked for it he would bundle him out of doors.

But a carriage drew up at Mrs. Callender’s one morning, and Lady Robert Ure stepped out. Her pale and patient face had the feeble and nervous smile of the humiliated and unloved.

“Mr. Storm,” she said in her gentle voice, “I have come on a delicate errand. I can not delay any longer a duty I ought to have discharged before.”

It was about Polly’s baby. She had heard of what had happened at the hospital; and the newspapers which had followed her to Paris, with reports of her wedding, had contained reports of the girl’s death also. Since her return she had inquired about the child, and discovered that it had been rescued by him and was now in careful keeping.

“But it is for me to look after it, Mr. Storm, and I beg of you to give it up to me. Something tells me that God will never give me children of my own, so I shall be doing no harm to any one, and my husband need never know whose child it is I adopt. I promise you to be good to it. It shall never leave me. And if it should live to be a man, and grow to love me, that will help me to forget the past and to forgive myself for my own share in it. Oh, it is little I can do for the poor girl who is gone–for, after all, she loved him and I took him from her. But this is my duty, Mr. Storm, and I can not sleep at night or rest in the day until it is begun.”

“I don’t know if it is your duty, dear lady, but if you wish for the child it is your right,” said John Storm, and they got into the carriage and drove to Soho.

“Boo-loo! Lal-la! Mum-um!” The child was tethered to the chair as usual and talking to the world according to its wont. When it was gone and the women on the doorsteps could see no more of the fine carriage of the great lady who had brought the odour of perfume and the rustle of silk into the dingy court, and Mrs. Pincher had turned back to the house with red eyes and her widow’s cap awry, John Storm told himself that everything was for the best. The last link with Glory was broken! Thank God for that! He might go on with his work now and need think of her no more!

That day he called at Clement’s Inn.

The Garden House was a pleasant dwelling, fronting on two of its sides to the garden of the ancient Inn of Chancery, and cosily furnished with many curtains and rugs. The Cockney maid who answered the door was familiar in a moment, and during the short passage from the hall to the floor above she communicated many things. Her name was Liza; she had heard him preach; he had made her cry; “Miss Gloria” had known her former mistress, and Mr. Drake had got her the present place.

There was a sound of laughter from the drawing-room. It was Glory’s voice. When the door opened she was standing in the middle of the floor in a black dress and with a pale face, but her eyes were bright and she was laughing merrily. She stopped when John Storm entered and looked confused and ashamed. Drake, who was lounging on the couch, rose and bowed to him, and Miss Macquarrie, who was correcting long slips of printer’s proofs at a desk by the window, came forward and welcomed him. Glory held his hand with her long hand-clasp and looked steadfastly into his eyes. His face twitched and her own blushed deeply, and then she talked in a nervous and jerky way, reproaching him for his neglect of her.

“I have been busy,” he began, and then stopped with a sense of hypocrisy. “I mean worried and tormented,” and then stopped again, for Drake had dropped his head.

She laughed, though there was nothing to laugh at, and proposed tea, rattling along in broken sentences that were spoken with a tremulous trill, which had a suggestion of tears behind it. “Shall I ring for tea, Rosa? Oh, you _have_ rung for tea! Ah, here it comes!–Thank you, Liza. Set it here,” seating herself. “Now who says the ‘girl’? Remember?” and then more laughter.

At that moment there was another arrival. It was Lord Robert Ure. He kissed Rosa’s hand, smiled on Glory, saluted Drake familiarly, and then settled himself on a low stool by the tea-table, pulled up the knees of his trousers, relaxed the congested muscles of one half of his face, and let fall his eyeglass.

Drake was handing out the cups as Glory filled them. He was looking at her attentively, vexed at the change in her manner since John Storm entered. When he returned to his seat on the sofa he began to twitch the ear of her pug, which lay coiled up asleep beside him, calling it an ugly little pestilence, and wondering why she carried it about with her. Glory protested that it was an angel of a dog, whereupon he supposed it was now dreaming of paradise–listen!–and then there were audible snores in the silence, and everybody laughed, and Glory screamed.

“I declare, on my honour, my dear,” said Drake with a mischievous look at John, “the creature is uglier than the beast that did the business on the day we eloped.”

“Eloped!” cried Rosa and Lord Robert together.

“Why, did you never hear that Glory eloped with me?”

Glory was trying to drown his voice with hollow laughter.

“She was seven and I was six and a half, and she had proposed to me in the orchard the day before!”

“Anybody have more tea? No? Some sally-lunn, perhaps?” and then more laughter.

“Hold your tongue, Glory! Nobody wants your tea! Let us hear the story,” said Rosa.

“Why, yes, certainly,” said Lord Robert, and everybody laughed again.

“She was all for travel and triumphal processions in those days—-“

Glory stopped her ears and began to sing:

Willy, Willy Wilkin,
Kissed the maid a-milkin’!
Fa, la la!

“There were so many things people could do if they wouldn’t waste so much time working—-“

Willy, Willy Wilkin
Kissed the maid—-

“Glory, if you don’t be quiet we’ll turn you out!” and Rosa got up and nourished her proofs.

“I had brought my dog, and when I called her a—-“

But Glory had leaped to her feet and fled from the room. Drake had leaped up also, and now, putting his back against the door, he raised his voice and went on with his story.

“Somebody saved us, though, and she lay in his arms and kissed him all the way home again.”

Glory was strumming on the door and singing to drown his voice. When the story was ended and she was allowed to come back she was panting and gasping with laughter, but there were tears in her eyes for all that, and Lord Robert was saying, with a sidelong look toward John Storm, “Really, this ought to be a scene in the new Sigurdsen, don’t you know!”

John had retired within himself during this nonsense. He had been feeling an intense hatred of the two men, and was looking as gloomy as deep water. “All acting, sheer acting,” he thought, and then he told himself that Glory was only worthy of his contempt. What could attract her in the society of such men? Only their wealth, and their social station. Their intellectual and moral atmosphere must weary and revolt her.

Rosa had to go to her newspaper office, and Drake saw her to the door. John rose at the same time, and Glory said, “Going already?” but she did not try to detain him. She would see him again; she had much to say to him. “I suppose you were surprised to hear that I had returned to London?” she said, looking up at his knitted brows.

He did not answer immediately, and Lord Robert, who was leaning against the chimney-piece, said in his cold drawl, “Your friend ought to be happy that you have returned to London, seems to me, my dear, instead of wasting your life in that wilderness.”

John drew himself up. “It’s not London I object to,” he said; “that was inevitable, I dare say.”

“What then?”

“The profession she has come back to follow.”

“Why, what’s amiss with the profession?” said Lord Robert, and Drake, who returned to the room at the moment, said: “Yes, what’s amiss with it? Some of the best men in the world have belonged to it, I think.”

“Tell me the name of one of them, since the world began, who ever lived an active Christian life.”

Lord Robert made a kink of laughter, and, turning to the window, began to play a tune with his finger tips on the glass of a pane. Drake struggled to keep a straight face, and answered, “It is not their role, sir.”

“Very well, if that’s too much to ask, tell me how many of them have done anything in real life, anything for the world, for humanity–anything whatever, I don’t care what it is.”

“You are unreasonable, sir,” said Drake, “and such objections could as properly apply to the professions of the painter and the musician. These are the children of joy. Their first function is to amuse. And surely amusement has its place in real life, as you say.”

“On the contrary,” said John, following his own thought, for he had not listened, “how many of them have lived lives of reckless abandonment, self-indulgence, and even scandalous license!”

“Those are abuses that apply equally to other professions, sir. Even the Church is not free from them. But in the view of reasonable beings one clergyman of evil life–nay, one hundred–would not make the profession of the clergy bad.”

“A profession,” said John, “which appeals above all to the senses, and lives on the emotions, and fosters jealousy and vanity and backbiting, and develops duplicity, and exists on lies, and does nothing to encourage self-sacrifice or to help suffering humanity, is a bad profession and a sinful one!”

“If a profession is sinful,” said Drake, “in proportion as it appeals to the senses, and lives on the emotions, and develops duplicity, then the profession of the Church is the most sinful in the world, for it offers the greatest temptations to lying, and produces the worst hypocrites and impostors!”

“That,” said John, with eyes flashing and passion vibrating in his voice–“that, sir, is the great Liar’s everlasting lie–and you know it!”

Glory was between them with uplifted hands. “Peace, peace! Blessed is the peacemaker! But tea! Will nobody take more tea? Oh, dear! oh, dear! Why can’t we have tea over again?”

“I know what you mean, sir,” said Drake. “You mean that I have brought Glory back to a life of danger and vanity, and sloth and sensuality. Very well. I deny your definition. But call it what you will, I have brought her back to the only life her talents are fit for, and if that’s all—-“

“Would you have done the same for your own sister?”

“How dare you introduce my sister’s name in this connection?”

“And how dare you resent it? What’s good for one woman is good for another.”

Glory was turning aside, and Drake was looking ashamed. “Of course–naturally–all I meant,” he faltered–“if a girl has to earn her living, whatever her talents, her genius–that is one thing. But the upper classes, I mean the leisured classes—-“

“Damn the leisured classes, sir!” said John, and in the silence that followed the men looked round, but Glory was gone from the room.

Lord Robert, who had been whistling at the window, said to Drake in a cynical undertone: “The man is hipped and sore. He has lost his challenge, and we ought to make allowances for him, don’t you know.”

Drake tried to laugh. “I’m willing to make allowances,” he said lightly; “but when a man talks to me as if–as if I meant to—-” but the light tone broke down, and he faced round upon John and burst out passionately: “What right have you to talk to me like this? What is there in my character, in my life, that justifies it? What woman’s honour have I betrayed? What have I done that is unworthy of the character of an English gentleman?”

John took a stride forward and came face to face and eye to eye with him. “What have you done?” he said. “You have used a woman as your decoy to win your challenge, as you say, and you have struck me in the face with the hand of the woman I love! That’s what you’ve done, sir, and if it’s worthy of the character of an English gentleman, then God help England!”

Drake put his hand to his head and his flushed face turned pale. But Lord Robert Ure stepped forward and said with a smile: “Well, and if you’ve lost your church so much the better. You are only an outsider in the ecclesiastical stud anyway. Who wants you? Your rector doesn’t want you; your Bishop doesn’t want you. Nobody wants you, if you ask me.”

“I don’t ask you, Lord Robert,” said John. “But there’s somebody who does want me for all that. Shall I tell you who it is? It’s the poor and helpless girl who has been deceived by the base and selfish man, and then left to fight the battle of life alone, or to die by suicide and go shuddering down to hell! That’s who wants me, and, God willing, I mean to stand by her.”

“Damme, sir, if you mean _me_, let me tell you what _you_ are,” said Lord Robert, screwing up his eyeglass. “You”–shaking his head right and left–“you are a man who takes delicately nurtured ladies out of sheltered homes and sends them into holes and hovels in search of abandoned women and their misbegotten children! Why”–turning to Drake-“what do you think has happened? My wife has fallen under this gentleman’s influence–the poor simpleton!–and not one hour before I left my house she brought home a child which he had given her to adopt. Think of it!–out of the shambles of Soho, and God knows whose brat and bastard!”

The words were hardly out of the man’s mouth when John Storm had taken him by both shoulders. “God _does_ know,” he said, “and so do I! Shall I tell you whose child that is? Shall I? It’s yours!” The man saw it coming and turned white as a ghost. “Yours! and your wife has taken up the burden of your sin and shame, for she’s a good woman, and you are not fit to live on the earth she walks upon!”

He left the two men speechless and went heavily down the stairs. Glory was waiting for him at the door. Her eyes were glistening after recent tears.

“You will come no more?” she said. She could read him like a book. “I can see that you intend to come no more.”

He did not deny it, and after a moment she opened the door and he passed out with a look of utter weariness. Then she went back to her room and flung herself on the bed, face downward.

The men in the drawing-room were beginning to recover themselves. Lord Robert was humming a tune, Drake pacing to and fro.

“Buying up his church to make a theatre for Glory was the very refinement of cruelty!” said Drake. “Good heavens! what possessed me?”

“Original sin, dear boy!” said Lord Robert, with a curl of the lip.

“Original? A bad plagiarism, you mean!”

“Very well. If _I_ helped you to do it, shall I help you to give it up? Withdraw the prospectus and return the deposits on shares–the dear Archdeacon’s among the rest.”

Drake took up his hat and left the house. Lord Robert followed him presently. Then the drawing-room was empty, and the hollow sound of sobbing came down to it from the bedroom above.

* * * * *

Father Storm read prayers in church that night with a hard and absent heart. A terrible impulse of hate had taken hold of him. He hated Drake, he hated Glory, he hated himself most of all, and felt as if seven devils had taken possession of him, and he was a hypocrite, and might fall dead at the altar.

“But what a fate the Almighty has saved me from!” he thought. Glory would have been a drag on his work for life. He must forget her. She was only worthy of his contempt. Yet he could not help but remember how beautiful she had looked in her mourning dress, with that pure pale face and its signs of suffering! Or how charming she had seemed to him even in the midst of all that deception! Or how she had held him as by a spell!

Going home he came upon a group of men in the Court. One of them planted himself full in front and said with an insolent swagger: “Me and my mytes thinks there’s too many parsons abart ‘ere. What do you think, sir?”

“I think there are more gamblers and thieves, my lad,” he answered, and at the next instant the man had struck him in the face. He closed with the ruffian, grappled him by the throat, and flung him on his back. One moment he held him there, writhing and gasping, then he said, “Get up, and get off, and let me see no more of you!”

“No, sir, not this time,” said a voice above his back. The crowd had melted away and a policeman stood beside them. “I’ve been waiting for this one for weeks, Father,” he said, and he marched the man to jail.

It was Charlie Wilkes. At the trial of Mrs. Jupe that morning, Aggie, being a witness, had been required to mention his name. It was all in the evening papers, and he had been dismissed from his time-keeping at the foundry.

XIII.

A week passed. Breakfast was over at Victoria Square, and John Storm was glancing at the pages of a weekly paper. “Listen!” he cried, and then read aloud in a light tone of mock bravery which broke down at length into a husky gurgle:

“‘The sympathy which has lately been evoked by the announcement that a proprietary church in Soho has been sold for secular uses, is creditable to public sentiment—-‘”

“Think of that, now!” interrupted Mrs. Callender.

“‘—-and no doubt the whole community will agree to hope that Father Storm will recover from the irritation natural to his eviction—-‘”

“Aye, we can all get over another body’s disappointment, laddie.”

“‘But there is a danger that in this instance the altruism of the time may develop a sentimentality not entirely good for public morals—-‘”

“When the ox is down there are lots of butchers, ye ken!”

“‘With the uses to which the fabric is to be converted, it is no part of our purpose to deal, further than to warn the public not to lend an ear to the all too prurient purity of the amateur moralist; but considering the character of the work now carried on in Soho, no doubt with the best intentions—-‘”

“Aye, aye, it’s easy to steal the goose and give the giblets in alms.”

“‘—-it behooves us to consider if the community is not to be congratulated on its speedy and effectual ending. Father Storm is a young man of some talents and social position, but without any special experience or knowledge of the world–in fact a weak, oversanguine, and rather foolish fanatic—-‘”

“Oh, aye, he’s down; down with him!”

“‘—-and therefore it is monstrous that he should be allowed to subvert the order of social life or disturb the broad grounds of the reasonable and the practical—-‘”

“Never mind. High winds only blaw on high hills, laddie!”

“‘—-As for the “fallen sister” whom he has taken under his special care, we confess to a feeling that too much sympathy has been wasted on her already. Her feet take hold of hell, her house is the way of the grave, going down to the chamber of death—-‘”

Mrs. Callender leaped to her feet. “That’s the ‘deacon-man; I ken the cloven hoof!”

John Storm had flung the paper away. “What a cowardly world it is!” he said. “But God wins in the end, and by God he shall!”

“Tut, man! don’t tak’ on like that. You can’t climb the Alps on roller-skates, you see! But as for the Archdeacon, pooh! I’m no windy aboot your ‘Sisters’ and ‘Settlements’ and sic like, but if there had been society papers in the Lord’s time, Simon the Pharisee would have been a namby-pamby critic compared to some of them.”

A moment afterward she was looking out of the window and holding up both hands. “My gracious! It’s himsel’! It’s the Prime Minister!”

A gaunt old gentleman with a meagre mustache, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and unfashionable black clothes, was stepping up to the door.

“Yes, it’s my uncle!” said John, and the old lady fled out of the room to change her cap.

“I have heard what has happened, John, so I have come to see you,” said the Prime Minister.

Was he thinking of the money? John felt uneasy and ashamed.

“I’m sorry, my boy, very sorry!”

“Thank you, uncle.”

“But it all comes, you see, of the ridiculous idea that we are a Christian nation! Such a thing couldn’t have occurred at the shrine of a pagan god!”

“It was only a proprietary church, uncle. I was much to blame.”

“I do not deny that you have acted unwisely, but what difference does that make, my boy? To sell a church seems like the climax of irreverence; but they are doing as bad every day. If you want to see what times the Church has fallen on, look at the advertisements in your religious papers–your Benefice and Church Patronage Gazette, and so forth. A traffic, John, a slave traffic, worse than anything in Africa, where they sell bodies, not souls!”

“It is a crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven,” said John; “but it is the Establishment that is to blame, not the Church, uncle.”

“We are a nation of money-lenders, my boy, and the Church is the worst usurer of them all, with its learned divines in scarlet hoods, who hold shares in music halls, and its Fathers in God living at ease and leasing out public-houses. _You_ have been lending money on usury too, and on a bad security. What are you going to do now?”

“Go on with my work, uncle, and do two hours where I did one before.”

“And get yourself kicked where you got yourself kicked before!”

“Why not? If God puts ten pounds on a man, he gives him strength to bear twenty.”

“John, John, I am feeling rather sore, and I can’t bear much more of it. I’m growing old, and my life is rather lonely too. Except your father, you are my only kinsman now, and it seems as if our old family must die with you. But come, my boy, come, throw up all this sorry masquerade. Isn’t there a woman in the world who can help me to persuade you? I don’t care who she is, or what, or where she comes from.”

John had coloured to the eyes, and was stammering something about the true priest cut off from earthly marriage, therefore free to commit himself completely to his work, when Mrs. Callender came back, spruce and smart, with many smiles and curtsies. The Prime Minister greeted her with the same old-fashioned courtesy, and they cooed away like two old doves, until a splendid equipage drove up to the door, and the plain old gentleman drove away in it.

“Wasn’t he nice with me? wasn’t he, now?” the old lady kept saying, and John being silent–“Tut! you young men are just puir loblollyboys with a leddy when the auld ones come.”

Going to Soho that day John Storm felt a sudden thrill at seeing on the street in front of him, walking in the same direction, an elderly figure in cassock and cord. It was the Father Superior of the Brotherhood. John overtook him and greeted him.

“Ah, I was on my way to see you, my son.”

“Then you have heard what has happened?”

“Yes, Satan’s shafts fly fast.” Then taking John’s arm as they walked, “Earthly blows are but reminders of Him, my son, like the hair shirt of the monk, and this trouble of yours is God’s reminder of your broken obedience. What did I tell you when you left us–that you would come back within a year? And you will! Leave the world, my son. It treats you badly. The human spirit reigns over it, and even the Church is a Christian society out of the sphere and guidance of the Divine Spirit. Leave it and return to your unfinished vows.”

John shook his head and took the Father into the clergy-house, where the girls were gathering for the evening. “How can I leave the world, Father, when there’s work like this to do? Society presents to a large proportion of these bright creatures the alternative, ‘Sell yourself or starve.’ But God says, ‘Live, work, and love.’ Therefore society is doomed, and that dead man’s sepulchre, the Establishment, is doomed, but the Church will live, and become the corner-stone of the new order, and stand between woman and the world, as it stood of old between the poor and the rich.”

The Father preached for John that night, taking for his text “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” And on parting from him at the door of the sacristy he said: “Religious work can only be good, my son, if it concerns itself first of all with the salvation of souls. Now what if it pleased God to remove you from all this–to call you to a work of intercession–say, to the mission field?”

John’s face turned pale. “There can be no need to fly,” he said, with a frightened look. “Surely London is a mission field wide enough for any man.”

“Yet who knows? Perhaps for your own soul’s sake, lest vanity should take hold of you, or the love of fame, or–or any of the snares of Satan! But good-bye, and God be with you!”

When John Storm reached home he found a letter awaiting him. It was from Glory:

“Are you dead and buried? If so, send me word, that I may compose your epitaph. ‘Here lies–_Lies_ is good, for though you didn’t promise to come back you ought to have done so; therefore it comes to the same thing in the end. You must not think too ill of Mr. Drake. I call him the milk of human kindness, and his friend Lord Robert the oil thereof–I mean the oil of vitriol. But his temper is like the Caspian Sea, having neither ebb nor flow, while yours is like the Bay of Biscay–oh, so I can’t expect you to agree. As for poor me, I may be guilty of all the seven deadly sins, but I can’t see why I should be boycotted on that account. There is something I didn’t know when you were here, and I want to explain about it. Therefore come ‘right away’ (Lord Bob, Americanized). Being slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, I will forgive you if you come soon. If you don’t, I’ll–I’ll go on the bike–feminine equivalent to the drink. To tell you the truth, I’ve done so already, having been careering round the gardens of the Inn during the early hours of morning, clad in Rosa’s ‘bloomers,’ in which I make a picture and a sensation at the same time, she being several sizes larger round the hips, and fearfully and wonderfully made. If that doesn’t fetch you I’ll go in for boxing next, and in a pair of four-ounce gloves I’ll cut a _striking_ figure, I can tell you.

“But, John Storm, have you cast me off entirely? Do you intend to abandon me? Do you think there is no salvation left for me? And are you going to let me sink in all this mire without stretching out a hand to help me? Oh, dear! oh, dear! I don’t know what has come over the silly old world since I came back to London. Think it must be teething, judging by the sharpness of its bite, and feel as if I should like to give it a dose of syrup of squills.”

As John read the letter his eyelids quivered and his mouth relaxed. Then he glanced at it again, and his face clouded.

“I can not leave her entirely to the mercy of men like these,” he thought.

This innocent daring, this babelike ripping up of serviceable conventions–God knows what advantage such men might take of it. He must see her once again, to warn, to counsel her. It was his duty–he must not shrink from it.

* * * * *

It had been a day of painful impressions to Glory. Early in the morning Lord Robert had called to take her to the “reading” of the new play. It took place in the saloon of an unoccupied Strand theatre, of which the stage also had been engaged for rehearsal. The company were gathered there, and, being more or less experienced actors and actresses, they received her with looks of courteous indulgence, as one whose leading place must be due to other things than talent. This stung her; she felt her position to be a false one, and was vexed that she had permitted Lord Robert to call for her. But her humiliation had yet hardly begun.

While they stood waiting for the manager, who was late, a gorgeous person with a waxed mustache and in a fur-lined coat, redolent of the mixed odour of perfume and stale tobacco, forced his way up to her and offered his card. She knew the man in a moment.

“I’m Josephs,” he said in a confidential undertone, “and if there’s anything I can do for you–acting management–anything–it vill give me pleesure.”

Glory flushed up and said, “But you don’t seem to remember, sir, that we have met before.”

The man smiled blandly. “Oh, yes. I’ve kept track of you ever since and know all about you. You hadn’t made your appearance then, and naturally I couldn’t do much. But now–_now_ if you vill give me de pleesure—-“

“Then an agent is one who can do nothing for you when you want help, but when you don’t want it—-“

The man laughed to carry off his audacity. “Veil, you know vhat they say of us–agent from _agere_,’to do,’ and we’re always ‘doing.’ Ha, ha! But if you are villing to let bygones he bygones, I am, and velcome.”

Glory’s face was crimson. “Will somebody go for the stage doorkeeper?” she said, and one of the company went out on that errand. Then, raising her voice so that everybody listened, she said: “Mr. Josephs, when I was quite unknown, and trying to get on, and finding it very hard, as we all do, you played me the cruellest trick a man ever played on a woman. I don’t owe you any grudge, but, for the sake of every poor girl who is struggling to live in London, I am going to turn you out of the house.”

“Eh? Vhat?”

The stage doorkeeper had entered. “Porter, do you see this gentleman? He is never to come into this theatre again as long as we are here, and if he tries to force his way in you are to call a policeman and have him bundled back into the street!”

“Daddle doo,” and the waxed mustache over the grinning mouth seemed to cut the face across.

When Josephs had gone Glory could see that the looks of indulgence on the faces of the company had gone also. “She’ll do!” said one. “She’s got the stuff in her!” said another, but Glory herself was now quaking with fear, and her troubles were not yet ended.

A little stout gentleman entered hurriedly with a roll of papers in his hand. He stepped up to Lord Robert, apologized for being late, and mopped his bald crown and red face. It was Sefton.

“This is to be our manager,” said Lord Robert, and Mr. Sefton bobbed his head, winked with both eyes, and said, “Charmed, I’m sure–charmed!”

Glory could have sunk into the earth for shame, but in a moment she had realized the crushing truth that when a woman has been insulted in the deepest place–in her honour–the best she can do is to say nothing about it.

The company seated themselves around the saloon, and the reading began. First came the list of characters, with the names of the cast. Glory’s name and character came last, and her nerves throbbed with sudden pain when the manager read, “and _Gloria_–Miss Glory Quayle.”

There was a confused murmur, and then the company composed themselves to listen. It was Gloria’s play. She was rather scandalous. After the first act Glory thought it was going to be the story of Nell Gwynne in modern life; after the second, of Lady Hamilton; and after the third, in which the woman wrecks and ruins the first man in the country, she knew it was only another version of the Harlot’s Progress, and must end as that had ended.

The actors were watching their own parts, and pointing and punctuating with significant looks the places where the chances came, but Glory was overwhelmed with confusion. How was she to play this evil woman? The poison went to the bone, and to get into the skin of such a creature a good woman would have to dispossess herself of her very soul. The reading ended, every member of the company congratulated some other member on the other’s opportunities, and Sefton came up to Glory to ask if she did not find the play strong and the part magnificent.

“Yes,” she said; “but only a bad woman could play that part properly.”

“_You’ll_ do it, my dear, you’ll do it on your own!” he answered gaily, and she went home perplexed, depressed, beaten down, and ashamed.

A newspaper had been left at the door. It was a second-rate theatrical journal, still damp from the press. The handwriting on the wrapper was that of Josephs, and there was a paragraph marked in blue pencil. It pretended to be a record of her short career, and everything was in it–the programme selling, the dressing, the foreign clubs–all the refuse of her former existence, set in a sinister light and leaving the impression of an abject up-bringing, as of one who had been _in_ the streets if not on them.

Well, she had chosen her life and must take it at its own price. But, oh, the cruelty of the world to a woman, when her very success could be her shame! She felt that the past had gripped her again–the pitiless past–she could never drag herself out of the mire.

That night she wrote to John Storm, and next morning before Rosa had risen–her duties kept her up late–she heard a voice downstairs. Her dog also heard it and began to bark. At the next moment John was in the room and she was laughing up into his splendid black eyes, for he had caught her down at the sofa holding the pug’s nose and trying to listen.

“Is it you? It’s so good of you to come early! But this, dog”–breaking into the Manx dialect–“she’s ter’ble, just ter’ble!” Then rising and looking serious: “I wished to tell you that I knew nothing about the church, nothing whatever. If I’d had the least idea… but they told me nothing–it was very wrong–nothing. And the first thing I knew was when I saw it in all the newspapers.”

He was leaning on the end of the mantelpiece. “If they deceived you like that, how can you go on with them?”

“You mean” (she was leaning on the other end, and speaking falteringly), “you mean that I ought to give it all up. But it’s too late for that now. It was too late when I came to know. Besides, it would do no good; you would be in the same position still, and as for me–well, somebody else would have the theatre, so where’s the use?”

“I was thinking of the future, Glory, not the past. People who deceive us once are capable of doing so again.”

“True–that’s true–only–only—-“

She was breaking down, and he turned his eyes away from her, saying, “Well, it’s all over now, and there’s no help for it.”

“No, there’s no help for it.”

He tried to think what he had come to say, but do what he would he could not remember. The moment he looked at her the thread of his thoughts was lost, and the fragrance of her presence, so sweet, so close, made him feel as if he wanted to touch her. There was an awkward silence, and then he fidgeted with his hat and moved.

“Are you going so soon?”

“I’m busy, and—-“

“Yes, you must be busy now.”

“And then why–why should we prolong a painful interview, Glory?”

She shot up a look under her eyebrows. His eyes had a harassed expression, but there was a gleam in them that set her heart beating.

“Is it so painful? Is it?”

“Glory, I meant to tell you I could not come again.”

“No! You’re not so busy as all that, are you? Surely” (the Manx again, only she seemed to be breathless now)–“surely you’re not so ter’ble busy but you can just put a sight on a girl now and again for all?”

He made a gesture with his hand. “It disturbs, it distracts—-“

“Oh, is that all? Then,” with a forced laugh, “I’ll come to see you instead. Yes, I will, though.”

“No, you mustn’t do that, Glory. It would only torment—-“

“Torment! Gough bless me! Why torment?” and a fugitive flame shot up at him.

“Because”–he stammered, and she could see that his lips quivered; then calmly, very calmly, pronouncing the words slowly, and in a voice as cold as ice–“because I love you!”

“You!”

“Didn’t you know that?” His voice was guttural. “Haven’t you known it all along? What’s the use of pretending? You’ve dragged it out of me. Was that only to show your power over me?”

“Oh!”

She had heard what her heart wanted to hear, and not for worlds would she have missed hearing it, yet she was afraid, and trembling all over.

“We two are of different natures, Glory, that’s the trouble between us–now, and always has been. We have nothing in common, absolutely nothing. You have chosen your path in life, and it is not my path. I have chosen mine, and it is not yours. Your friends are not my friends. We are two different beings altogether, and yet–and yet I love you! And that’s why I can not come again.”

It was sweet, but it was terrible. So different from what she had dreamed of: “I love you!–you are my soul!–I can not live without you!” Yet he was right. She had slain his love before it was born to her–it was born dead. In an unsteady voice, which had suddenly become husky, she said:

“No doubt you are right. I must leave you to judge. Perhaps you have thought it all out.”

“Don’t suppose it will be easy for me, Glory. I’ve suffered a good deal, and I dare say I shall suffer more yet. If so, I’ll bear it. But for the sake of my work—-“

“Ah!–But of course I can’t expect–Naturally you love your work also—-“

“I _do_ love my work also, and therefore it’s no use trifling. ‘If thine eye offend–‘”

She was stung. “Well, since there’s no help for it, I suppose we must shake hands and part.”

Not until then–not until he had pronounced his doom and she had accepted it did he realize how beautiful she seemed to him. He felt as if something in his throat wanted to cry out.

“It isn’t what I expected, Glory–what I dreamed of for years.”

“But it’s best–it seems best.”

“I tried to make a place for you, too, but you wouldn’t have it–you let it go; you preferred this other lot in life.”

She remembered Josephs, and Sefton, and the newspaper, and the part, and she covered her face with her hands.

“How can I go on, Glory, to the peril of my–It’s dangerous, even dangerous.”

“Yes, you are a clergyman and I am an actress. You must think of that. People are so ignorant, so cruel, and I dare say they are talking already.”

“Do you think I should care for that, Glory?” Her hands came down from her face. “Do you think I should care one jot if all the miserable scandal-mongering world thought—-“

“You’ll think the best of me, then?”

“I’ll think of both of us as we used to be, my child, before the world came between us, before you—-“

She was fighting against an impulse to fling herself into his arms, but she only said in a soft voice: “You are quite right, quite justified. I have chosen my lot in life, and must make the best of it.”

“Well—-” He was holding out his hand.

But nevertheless she put her hand behind her, thinking: “No; if I shake hands with him it will be the end of everything.”

“Good-bye!” and with an expression of utter despair he left her.

She did not cry, and when Rosa came down immediately afterward she was smiling and her eyes were very bright.

“Was that your friend Mr. Storm? Yes? You must beware of him, my dear. He would stop your career and think he was doing God’s service.”

“There’s no danger of that, Rosa. He only came to say he would come no more,” and then something flashed in her eyes and died away, and then flashed again.

“Yes,” thought Rosa, “there’s an extraordinary attraction about her that makes all other women seem tame.” And then Rosa remembered somebody else, and sighed.

* * * * *

John Storm went back to Soho by way of Clare Market, and when people saluted him in the streets with “Good-morning, Father,” he did not answer because he did not see them. On going to church that night he came upon a group of Charlie’s cronies betting six to one against his getting off, and a girl in gay clothes was waiting to speak to him. It was Aggie. She had come to plead for Charlie.

“It’s the drink, sir. ‘E’s a good boy when ‘e’s not drinking. But I ask pardon for ‘im; and if you would only not prosecute—-“

John was ashamed of himself at sight of the girl’s fidelity to her unworthy lover.

“And you, my child–what about you?”

“Oh, I’m all right. What’s broken can’t be mended.”

And meanwhile the church bells were ringing and the cabs were running to the theatres.

XIV.

The rehearsals began early in the morning and usually lasted until late in the afternoon. Glory found them wearisome, depressing, and often humiliating. The body of the theatre was below the level of the street, and in the daytime was little better than a vast vault. If she entered by the front she stumbled against seats and saw the figures of men and women silhouetted in the distance, and heard the echo of cavernous voices. If by the back, she came upon the prompter’s table set midway across the stage, with a twin gas-bracket shooting up behind it like a geyser, and an open space of some twenty feet by twenty in front whereon the imaginary passions were to disport themselves at play.

Glory found real ones among them, and they were sometimes in hideous earnest. Jealousy, envy, uncharitableness, and all the rancour of life where the struggle for it is bitterest, attempts to take advantage of her inexperience, to rob her of the best positions on the stage, to cut out her lines which “scored”–these, with the weary waits, the half darkness, the chill atmosphere, the void in front, with its seats in linen covers, suggesting an audience of silent ghosts, and then the sense of the bright, busy, bustling, rattling, real world above, sent her home day after day with a headache, a heartache, and tears bubbling out of her eyes.

And when she had conquered these conditions, or settled down to them, and had made such progress with her part as to throw away her scrip, the old horror of the woman she was to make herself into, came back as a new terror. The visionary Gloria was very proud and vain and selfish, and trampled everything under foot that she might possess the world and the things of the world.